Private School Tuition Tax Credit Assailed

Tax credits for nonpublic school tuition would mean "the destruction of public education," a former national Parent-Teacher Association president said last week in the Lehigh Valley.

Grace Baisinger, who is president of the National Trust for Public Education, said the enactment of tuition tax credits would result in the federal government giving three times as much aid to nonpublic schools as to public schools.

She had a generally sympathetic audience - the Lehigh Valley School Study Council, most of whose members are top administrators in public schools.

President Reagan has advocated tuition tax credits as a way of giving financial relief to parents and stimulating choice and competition in education. His 1985 budget proposes that parents be given tax credits for 50 percent of tuition at nonpublic schools.

Mrs. Baisinger, PTA president 1977-79, said the credits would benefit mainly the well-to-do. She said only 5 percent of nonpublic schools offer programs for the handicapped and only 2 percent offer vocational training.

She added that nonpublic school spokesmen fought against including in the legislation provisions barring discrimination in admission of the handicapped and racial minorities.

"Yet they claim they are going to compete," she argued. "Yes, they're going to compete. They're going to compete for the buck. The public schools will be left only with the poor."

She said the notion that nonpublic schools receive no government aid is a misconception. State governments are already aiding those schools, to the tune of $60 million annually in Pennsylvania and $57 million in New Jersey.

(After she gave those figures, several in the audience suggested they are actually too low, probably because transportation costs were not included.)

She believed that a tilt in federal support toward nonpublic education "would literally scare people out of the public schools."

Giving a brief history of the tuition tax credit proposal, Mrs. Baisinger noted it was passed by the House in 1977 but defeated in the Senate. Her national coalition - which includes 60 educational, civil rights, religious and labor groups - came together that year.

However, the group "coasted" several years thereafter, because President Carter promised to veto any such legislation. Now that President Reagan has revived the issue, the various nonpublic school groups are presenting a more united front, a recent Minnesota court decision favored government aid to nonpublic schools and more middle-class people are interested.

"When the middle class begins to push for something, it moves to the top of the agenda," said Mrs. Baisinger, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of George Washington University.

Saying the public has been inadequately informed on the issue, she urged those in attendance to form local coalitions to get the word out.

"The time is right because of a growing recognition that economic health depends on education," she commented. "We hear so much bad about our public schools, it's irritating."

Most recent Pennsylvania Department of Education figures show that public school enrollment tops nonpublic enrollment more than 4-1: 1.8 million public, 401,628 nonpublic.